Anna Tsing

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (born 1952) is an American anthropologist. She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Education

Tsing received her B.A. from Yale University and completed her M.A. (1976) and PhD (1984) at Stanford University.

Career

On receiving her doctoral degree, she served as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder (1984–86) and as an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1986–89). She then joined UC Santa Cruz.

Tsing has published more than 40 articles in prominent journals including Cultural Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies Bulletin. She won the Harry Benda Prize for her book In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1994). Her second book, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005), was awarded the Senior Book Prize of the American Ethnological Society.

In 2010 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her project On the Circulation of Species: The Persistence of Diversity, an ethnography of the matsutake mushroom.

In 2013, Tsing was granted the Niels Bohr Professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark for her contributions to interdisciplinary work in the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and the arts. She is currently developing a transdisciplinary program for exploring the Anthropocene. Tsing is director of the AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene) research center. The project was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation for a five-year period until 2018.

Among the institutions she is affiliated with are the American Anthropological Association, the American Ethnological Society, and the Association for Asian Studies.

In 1999, Tsing began a relationship with the political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott, which lasted until his death in 2024.

Major themes

Plantationocene

Together with scholar Donna J. Haraway, Tsing coined Plantationocene as an alternative term to the proposed epoch Anthropocene that centers humans activities in the transformation of the planet and its negative effect on land use, ecosystems, biodiversity, and species extinction.

Tsing and Haraway point out that not all humans equally contribute to the environmental challenges facing our planet. They date the origin of the Anthropocene to the start of colonialism in the Americas in the early modern era and highlight the violent history behind it by focusing on the history of plantations. The Spanish and the Portuguese colonists started importing models of plantations to the Americas by the 1500s which they had previously developed a century earlier in the Atlantic Islands. These models of plantation were based on migratory forced labor (slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and constant racialized violence, which have all transformed the lives of humans and non-humans worldwide. Current and past plantations have been important nodes in the histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism—histories inseparable from environmental issues that made some humans more than others vulnerable to warming temperatures, rising seawater levels, toxicants, and land disposition.

Notable works

Some of Tsing's notable work comprise the following books:

In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place (1993)

Anna Tsing's first book centers around individuals from Meratus Dayak, from South Kalimantan, Indonesia. Tsing's key informant is Uma Adang, who provides her insight into shamanism, politics and the mythology in relation to ethnic identity. The book focuses on the topic of marginality within a state and the context of community within a gendered framework.

Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004)

Tsing's ethnography is based in the Meratus Mountains of South Kalimantan, a province in Indonesia. The term friction is described as, "the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference." This ethnography was based on short-term, consecutive instances of field work; the methods are based on "ethnographic fragments". The book is a study on human dominated landscapes, running themes include corporate exploitation, globalization, environmental activism, and environmental degradation. Friction has become a standard text in graduate seminars in geography, sociology, critical theory, feminist studies, environmental studies, and political economy, among other areas.